{"id":215,"date":"2012-07-10T20:41:35","date_gmt":"2012-07-10T20:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/62.131.51.129\/wordpress\/?p=215"},"modified":"2012-07-10T20:41:35","modified_gmt":"2012-07-10T20:41:35","slug":"going-back-in-time-or-re-enter-the-mainframe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"Going back in time &#8211; or re-enter the mainframe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I entered the world of the mainframe, I realised that this is a world on it own; it has their own rules and newbies are not easily accepted here. From a support form I read this message from a sysadm: &#8220;.. (this) is a system for people who know what to do and how to do it. It is not a system for obvious clueless newbies like you. I suggest you start reading manuals for the next few weeks.<br \/>\nYou are telling us &#8220;But I fail.&#8221;<br \/>\nFail with what, failing to read manuals? Failing to tell us what error messages you get?&#8221;.<br \/>\nOuch that hurts and it does not help the poor user who gets an error and doesn&#8217;t know what to do.<\/p>\n<p>From the same forum : &#8220;Open a book on JCL &#8211; they are all available online and start reading about the required format&#8230;<br \/>\n.. further notes:<br \/>\nTo other members: Do not provide &#8220;xxxx&#8221; with a solution, let him figure out what is wrong by opening a manual&#8221;.<br \/>\nAnother example of the helpful sysadm. Another example of a user who is left in the dark.<\/p>\n<p>This is the mainframe.<\/p>\n<p>Compare these type of reactions to the gentle reactions on the Ubuntu site. It starts with: &#8220;You can find support from a variety of sources. Take a look \u2013 you&#8217;re likely to find an answer to every question. If you can&#8217;t find an answer, just ask the people in our active forums.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The mainframe is completely different. A quick guide is nowhere to find; the manual are difficult to understand; the sysadm seriously believe that they are next to God.<\/p>\n<p>However, I strongly believe that mainframe is less difficult than one might think. After all, it is created by ordinary people and their work should be understandable by us humble beings. I give first three books that may help you out:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Menendez &amp; Lowe &#8220;Murach&#8217;s \u00a0OS\/390 and z\/os JCL&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Murach, Prince &amp; Menendez &#8220;Murach&#8217;s mainframe COBOL&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Garvin &amp; Eckols &#8220;Db2 for the COBOL programmer&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I will return with some elements that helped me understanding the mainframe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I entered the world of the mainframe, I realised that this is a world on it own; it has their own rules and newbies are not easily accepted here. From a support form I read this message from a sysadm: &#8220;.. (this) is a system for people who know what to do and how [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-to-know"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}